10 years since Columbine

Monday was the ten-year anniversary of the shootings at Columbine high school in Littleton, not far from where we live in Denver. I'm sure that the coverage has been nationwide, but obviously since this was a local tragedy, the coverage here has been pretty dense. Some of it I find distasteful; I never like footage of sobbing, distraught people because I find it invasive and manipulative, and to re-air such terrible footage ten years down the line only shows that such footage does not improve with time.

But it has definitely been an eye-opening experience for me, to see how this community has handled such a tragedy. They say that everyone remembers where they were when they found out about the shootings, but that's not true for me. I have a vague memory of where I was when I found out, but I think it's wrong because the memory I have is of my middle school and the shootings took place in 1999, when I was in high school.

Still, I do remember being very upset about it, all the more so because it was my peers who were affected; high school kids just like me. It was not difficult to make the transfer and imagine that the shootings had taken place at my high school instead of another; seeing people my own age on the news, reading about people my own age being shot... well, it was easy to relate.

I recently finished a book that I loved, The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb, a novel that focuses on a couple who both worked at Columbine High School and how they were affected by the shootings over the next ten years. The book is fascinating, and may be my favorite of Wally Lamb's books, though I love them all.

One thing that it touched on was the fury toward the two shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. The refusal to acknowledge that when they turned their guns on themselves, their lives were lost too. That although they committed a heinous act, they too were victims. That, especially, their families were victims.

I can understand that attitude, and never having been in the position of having someone I love killed by another person, I don't know how I would react in that situation. But certainly if your child has been shot in cold blood, and at school, a place that's supposed to be safe--well, I doubt you'd have much sympathy for the killers. Especially right after the event.

But still, it makes me sad that ten years later, the victim count is at 13, not 15. That the two killers weren't named at any memorial services. That a woman carrying a sign asking that all 15 victims be remembered was asked to leave the memorial service.

In my opinion, anyone who is depraved enough to want to end the lives of innocent people around them... that person has a problem. A serious problem, one much bigger than himself. One that he is most likely not equipped to deal with on his own. That person is, in a different way from those people that he killed, a victim. A victim whose life ended prematurely, even if he chose to end it while his victims did not have that same choice.

And more than the killers themselves, the families of the shooters are victims. They, along with the other parents, lost their children. But unlike those other parents, they have no sympathy. They can't look back and say, Oh, I had a wonderful, beautiful, loving child who was struck down too young through no fault of his own. Instead, they have to live with guilt and horror, with questions, wondering how they managed not to see the signs, wondering if they could have done anything to prevent this from happening, wondering how they could have raised a child who would grow up to do something so terrible.

And they have no public sympathy, no support. The community is not willing to acknowledge their losses, their dilemmas. A local priest lost his job after performing a service for Dylan Klebold at the request of his father. Who is there for those families? And who is pointing fingers and making their ordeal worse, even ten years later?

But maybe I'm the only one to feel this way. Maybe it would just make all those memorial services more painful for the families of those who were killed, maybe even ten years later the community is just too close to the situation to be able to acknowledge that those who wrought the violence were victims themselves, and that their families continue to be victims. Maybe people really do believe that those two killers' actions were the result of some sort of fault or negligence on the part of their families.

What do you think? Should the killers and their families be acknowledged in these memorial services, these ways of remembering those who lost their lives or whose lives were forever altered that day?